Saturday, May 25, 2013

In The
Strugglefor a Proletarian Party,
mid-century Trotskyist J.P. Cannon includes a letter to a comrade entitled
“Concerning Johnson.” As Cannon relates to his comrade, Johnson is utterly
unruly, demonstrating a marked indifference to party organizing both in terms
of personal discipline and politico-philosophical ethos. Remarkably, Cannon
relates, “Johnson, the disorganizer, is going to lead a discussion of the Los
Angeles comrades on the organization question. This impudence can only be based
on the assumption that any kind of quackery can prosper in Southern
California.” Cannon takes heart that he “know[s] another California—the
California of a group of resolute Trotskyists who have shown in practice that
they know how to organize a party and do serious work in the mass movement.” Cannon’s
California knows how to Party. Alas, if only Johnson would refrain from
spreading his disorganizing philosophy to such comrades and instead “go to
school to them…”

The “Johnson” in question is
none other than C.L.R. James, who would continue to (dis)organize Trotskyist
groups for another 7 years before ultimately breaking wholesale with the
organizational principle of the Party. I return to this report on James’ incorrigibility
in the wake of recent calls from various left formations to stop partying and
start Partying. I hope that James’ example and words might carry some weight.
After all, one of the primary calls for a New Newest Left has come from Jacobin, whose masthead’s graphic of
Toussaint L’Ouverture obviously alludes to James’ Black Jacobins. I’ve always held out hopes for Jacobin on the basis of that citation, but I’m starting to realize
that the image of Toussaint represents a massive misreading of James’
masterwork—a misreading with rather sinister implications. The Black Jacobins is, after all, a study in
revolutionary-organizational tragedy, a look into the way in which a people
throws up a revolutionary leader who then becomes increasingly distant from his
organic base. This tragic theme is particularly clear after the 1963
edits—revisions and additions made well after James broke practically and
philosophically with the Party-form. I always read Jacobin’s Toussaint graphic as a kind of catachresis for the social
mass that created and buoyed Toussaint, but now I’m realizing that, well, Jacobin is just totally into Toussaint
as Revolutionary Leader, Organizer Extraordinaire.

Jacobin is
not alone. Alongside the recent “Fellow Travelers”
editorial in Jacobin, the well circulated
#Accelerate
manifesto also demands that leftists learn how to Party. The two documents
are quite different in terms of their general philosophical
moorings—#Accelerate is technophilic, Deleuzean, Landean; “Fellow Travelers” is
just kind of humanist, less concerned with establishing an ontology of the
present—so their general convergences are all the more remarkable. In Cannonite
phrases, each text chastises today’s left for not being “serious” enough, for
onanistically obsessing over such small things as horizontal organizing and
direct action instead of getting down to the real business of reproducing a New
Newest Left. Curiously, each call-to-Party organizes itself through a reference
to a left auto-erotics. Jacobin’sBhaskar Sunkara compares today’s left—“enthusiasts
of sectarian minutia, reenactors of old battles, collectors of decontextualized
quotes”—to a dude “jacking off” on the subway. (It’s hard to credit Jacobin’s desire to get away from
sectarian minutia and the reenactment of old battles when such a program is
stated in the same issue in which they published Vivek
Chibber’s trolling nonsense.) Meanwhile, #Accelerate has some sharp words
for those radicals who, “hold[ing] to a folk
politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism” end up
“privileg[ing] self-esteem rather than effective action.” Adopting the idiom of
the Italian Marxists, they chastise radicals for being too into “affective
self-valorisation.” The New Newest Left doesn’t want to stroke its own ego or
its own cock; it wants to get down to the hard fucking business of forming a
unified organization. I mean, we’re talking about going vertical, getting hard,
getting all phallic. Those of us who don’t want to Party just have disorganized,
infantile libidos. We need to grow up, to take ourselves more seriously. “The
problem with the Left,” according to Sunkara, “isn’t that it’s too austere and
serious; it’s that it doesn’t take itself seriously enough to make the changes
necessary for political practice.”

The metaphorics are kind of
silly, kind of confused. I mean, can one think of something more auto-erotic, more
narcissistically invested, than some dude offering up yet another contribution
to the archive of revolutionary Party invitations? Indeed, these masturbatory
metaphorics are mobilized as a mechanism of disavowal, for “Fellow Travelers” is
all about self-touching. For Sunkara, the U.S. left already possesses an
“internal culture”; “we” already know who our “fellow travelers” are. The aim
of the article is thus to produce (imaginatively, then institutionally) an
organized scene of auto-affection in which the left can get a grip on itself,
hold itself together in the single corporate body of the “non-sectarian”
socialist Party. “The strength of the Left,” after all, “is in organization,”
and what we need is “a larger, more centralized organization,” one that would
be “non-sectarian” in spirit and equipped with a “well-run administrative
apparatus” decked out with paid staffers. (Every radical’s wet dream: someone
to do photo copies.) Sunkara isn’t opposed to left auto-erotics at all; we just
need to learn how and when to best touch ourselves. (Preferably not on subways,
preferably while reading Jacobin.)
#Accelerate suggests that the best way to stop with all this gratuitous
self-love—which remains, as always, self-abuse—is for revolutionaries to get
hitched: “The command of The Plan must be married to the improvised order of
The Network.” Lenin and Mark Zuckerberg, I now pronounce you man and wife.

So many problems. First off,
it’s hard for me to see left unification—either ideologically or
organizationally—as an unqualified good. As I see it, the splintering of the
left over concerns regarding race and gender, for instance, was extraordinarily
productive for furthering leftist politics. It’s the lessons I’ve learned from anarcha-
and Marxist-feminisms, for instance, that cause me to cringe at the flip way
with which Sunkara can presence a subway masturbator’s phallic aggression and
then recommend “not…star[ing]” at it at the conclusion of his piece. Radical
feminists splintered from “non-sectarian” parties precisely because they were
asked to avert their gazes from the crazy masculinism of left
organizations—and, indeed, the social more broadly. Moreover, dissensus is the
stuff of the political, and I can’t imagine joining a group who thinks it an
act of revolutionary generosity to “allow…open factions.” A “non-sectarian”
party that desires to “foster a pluralistic culture [… of] comradely debate and
open disagreement” is simply a party that has absorbed liberal multiculti as an
organizational principle. We can debate and act together without consolidating
ourselves into a “larger body.” We’re doing it now. There are far more flexible
forms of putting groups in contact while maintaining autonomy than that of a
centralized organization (which is the placeholder term for Party in the piece,
a word that Sunkara knows to be chary of saying).

I also don’t get the desire
for centralization. Jacobin claims
that the strength of the left consists in organization but, in that case, it’s
unclear why the strengthening of leftist organizations should entail a step
back to (pre-)Fordist modalities of political organization in a post-Fordist capitalist
landscape. Even MBAs know that flexible decentralization—for them in terms of
labor processes, not in terms of the channeling of profit, of course—unleashes
greater productive potentials than hierarchical forms of centralization, and I
like thinking that my comrades have at least achieved the level of savvy of a
Wharton undergrad. But then, reading #Accelerate, you realize that the authors
have the same exact desire as a student at a B-school: they want to manage
social capital more efficiently, they want a “Promethean politics of maximal
mastery over society and its environment,” and they earnestly request “funding,
whether from governments, institutions, think tanks, unions, or individual
benefactors” to get their Accelerationist startup off the ground. Of course,
#Accelerate claims that they don’t want centralization, they want “an ecology
of organizations.” Fair enough, I guess. But even if I could look beyond the
metaphorics of Prometheus and the Plan, it’s hard to get over the relentless
pounding that horizontal modes of organizing take—a pounding that is the effect
of the authors incomprehension that horizontalism does in fact produces a
robust economy of organizations and that, moreover, horizontal processes can
equip themselves with all the organizational bells and whistles they ascribe to
the coming Accelerationist Party. These include “secrecy, verticality, and
exclusion.” Only a crazy straw-manning of horizontals, or a profound lack of
familiarity with anarchist practice, or a less-than-covert desire for a
centralized Party, can lead one to ignore the fact that lots of horizontal
formations make temporary use of all
of these organizational protocols.

And then there’s the
question of the space of the political. Put simply, #Accelerate is tired of the
localization of the political. Capital, after all, is global, abstract, and
mobile, but silly horizontals spend all their time engaging concretely with
their bounded life-worlds. Jacobin
isn’t as explicitly antagonistic toward the local, but it seems clear to me
that any form of political centralization necessarily requires a reconstitution
of political space, an accumulation of political power/consciousness in a
determinate (virtual or real-physical) locale. (We will call that locale Yew
Nork.) In both cases, I think that there is a profound misrecognition regarding
contemporary scales of the political-economic. Particularly in the case of
#Accelerate: Can anyone really oppose the global to the local in binary fashion
anymore? (Could we ever?) Some of the most vibrant radical movements of our
time have moved from “the local” to form an alternative mode of worldliness.
I’m thinking here of a movement like Via Campesina, which uses a kind of
federative organizational structure to articulate and coordinate diverse
localities. (There doesn’t seem to be much room for peasant movements, or
really any movements from the Global South at all, in the big-data,
fast-capital world of #Accelerate.) At the same time, these evacuations of the
local as a scene of political import reproduces the inaugural gesture of
capitalist parliamentarianism, which accumulates the political, centralizes it,
and puts it at a practical and sensory distance from ordinary lifeworlds. “Die
Welt ist fort, ich muß dich tragen!” says the centralized Party to the local.
But the point of all this can’t be to carry the bereft prepolitical masses into
the over-there world of the Real Political, right? Isn’t at least a small part
of our work linked to the production of new political sensoriums, new
sensoriums of the political, so that we can ironize the ontological density of
the state and capital and not feel like we’re living defective half-lives if
we’re barred from access to either?

I’m obviously annoyed at all
of this stuff, but I think I get it. The Jacobin
piece and the #Accelerate manifesto are the products of a profound sadness,
even a despair. They’re replaying the late cycle of rebellion in their
collective brains, wondering where it all went wrong. If only Occupy hadn’t
been so bogged down in a de-centralized democratic process that inhibited
concrete actions… If only there was some vigorous leadership to steer the
rudderless masses… If only we had found a tactic that didn’t bind us to
concrete localities—a park, a campus green—and instead had come up with some
counter to the flexible globality of capitalism… Bad faith in the present allows for a
recuperation of bad pasts: “Fellow Travelers” reads like a Party program from
1941, and Marx-Engels already wrote #Accelerate in 1847 (just sub in the
Internet for “electric telegraphs,” “big data” for the “application of
chemistry to industry,” and anarchists and horizontalists for Marx’s utopian
socialists). The Party-to-come is a kind of afterparty, a mournful tired
attempt to recuperate what was but in an alternative form. Recent history is
what hurts; donning the costumes of deep history is warm and cozy and
fuzzy-feeling.

But the last cycle of
rebellion didn’t collapse because we didn’t have proper leadership, proper
theory, proper direction. (Or, Jesus help me, adequate liberal allies.) We
didn’t—and don’t—need leaders, orientation, or a Plan. We don’t need “small
groups of organized militants” to “pav[e] the way for mass action and sweeping
structural change.” (Occupy marked the massification of the figure of the
militant in the U.S.) The last cycle of rebellion closed because we couldn’t
keep up the intensity, because our feedback loop of positive affect was
shattered by the State and by our own failures to stay committed to the
democracy that we were making. There certainly were organizational problems at
the encampments—after all, we’re still learning how to be democratic, how to be
productively and unproductively in each other’s way. But I don’t think we can
derive any grand organizational-theoretical knowledge from Occupy’s collapse,
and certainly none that could justify a shift in organizational axioms and a return
to left verticalism. (We can, and have, drawn plenty of
practical-organizational lessons from it, however.) There’s no big lesson: we
just fucking lost. Got beat. Got beat up. “Not everything’s a lesson,” in the words
of one fictional Office worker,”
“sometimes you just fail.” (Let’s take a pause to listen to “Benfica.”)

The New Newest Left is
turning to the Party in a spirit of sadness; it’s a reparative gesture, and all
claims about confidence in its politico-organizational future are simply therapeutic
utterances. Indeed, I find the New Newest Left’s sadness to be contagious: it’s
upsetting to watch smart comrades spend so much time shitting on radical
leftists in the hope of forming a party acceptable to liberals in order to
recompose a Keynesian state that quite simply will never come back. Reformism
today is more utopian than revolution. When I read Jacobin, I can’t help but think of one of Berlant’s points from The
Female Complaint: the assumption of certain forms of conventionality
allows for a feeling of being in proximity to a world, but at the cost of a
crazy expenditure of affective energy and cognitive attention. Left conventionalism
is hard work, it takes a lot of time and effort to try to resuscitate the
Party, and I wonder what might happen if this energy and attention were
directed elsewhere. And it should be: the Party isn’t coming back, and long
marches through institutions will always turn into highways through an
interminable hell. (Sidebar: If some party does come back, though, if you guys
manage to get something off the ground—great! I’ll be at your marches, your
gatherings, I’ll read your shit. Horizontals are always pretty okay with forming
temporary alliances with verticals; anarchists are always at the anti-austerity
demos, after all. It would be easier to be in the same cognitive and real space
as you guys, though, if you could stop anarchist-bashing so as to be more
appealing to liberals, okay?)

I want to end by returning
to C.L.R. James, the Great Disorganizer. Starting in the late 40s, James’
adopted a new premise in his approach to the social: for James, state-capitalism
had in effect valorized workers’ capacities to the point that all forms of
politico-economic organization (by Party, by State, by Capital) were
experienced by all as the mere brutality of violent command. With the Hungarian
Revolution, he declared the Party decisively defeated: “One of the greatest
achievements of the Hungarian Revolution was to destroy once and for all the
legend that the working class cannot act successfully except under the
leadership of a political party” (Facing
Reality, 14). Confronted with the revolution’s defeat, James didn’t look
backwards for to-hand principles of organization—the Party—but forwards, to a
future he couldn’t know. “The pitfall,” he and his comrades caution, “is to
believe and to act as if these or other formations are embryonic Soviets,
Workers Councils, parties of the future, and such-like fantasies. No groups of
individuals can anticipate the social formations of the future. These gestate,
no one knows how long, but compensate by being full-grown at birth. The mass
organizations of today are distinguished as much by anything as by this: they
do not worry about their future.”

The sadness of the New
Newest Left, the worrying over futures: this derives from their conception of
themselves as occupying a position of exteriority vis-à-vis the social, of
standing outside or looking down on it, and thinking, “Fuck, what are we going
to do?” It’s a false drama, the old theater of “activists” and “militants” and,
above all, the Party. We need to get that, today, the term “activist” can only
serve as a sociological (auto)description, never as a social-ontological
reality. There are no more activists, no more militants, no more Parties. All
of the social knowledges and powers we used to attribute to those terms are
immanent to the social itself. We don’t need to organize, to treat ourselves or
the social as a technical object. “We” don’t need to worry about the future of
the social, whoever the fuck the “we” is that arrogates to itself the role of
providing pastoral, Dad-ish, anxious care. The future of the social will always
outwit us, evade and erode our anticipations; the combined mass of the social
will always be more creative than a cohort of comrades or the editorial board
of a small mag. Let’s put paid to the entire organizer’s imaginary, the
exhausted vocabulary of the Party and the Plan. Let’s disorganize—that is, let’s
undertake the labor of interdicting politico-social forms that inhibit the
immanent auto-organization of the invading socialist society. In the end, it’s
not “young activists” that should “leave us confident about the future” (more
self-love) but the teeming mass of disorganized and disorganizing sociality
finding its own immanent form.

Hi Jodi—Maybe we can both
tone it down a little. I’ll go first. If I could reboot, I’d begin with
something that only appears way down at the bottom of my post, and in
parentheses to boot:

“(Sidebar: If some party
does come back, though, if you guys manage to get something off the ground—great!
I’ll be at your marches, your gatherings, I’ll read your shit. Horizontals are
always pretty okay with forming temporary alliances with verticals; anarchists
are always at the anti-austerity demos, after all. It would be easier to be in
the same cognitive and real space as you guys, though, if you could stop
anarchist-bashing so as to be more appealing to liberals, okay?)”

It’s a small moment, too
small to claim that the entire piece was motivated by a desire to come to an
understanding with Partiers and Statists. I was no doubt much more motivated by
my anger at the rhetorical treatment that the non- or anti-Party left has
received in the wake of Occupy—just as you are angered at me for “[d]ismissing”
the dedication, courage, or history of our militants. (I wasn’t doing that at
all, by the way.) And not, mind, angry as an anarchist, as you identified me. I
actually consider myself an autonomist Marxist, or some hybrid anarcho-Marxist,
but, no matter what, you and I actually think with, refer back to, and identify
with the same tradition. Differently, to be sure, but we’re playing with the
same deck of cards. So, when I offered my critique of the new Party Left, I
wasn’t doing it from a position of exteriority. I was doing it as a Marxist,
concerned both to bring the communist horizon nearer and to patch up the
needlessly antagonistic relationship between verticals and horizontals,
Partiers and partiers.

I thus found it both sad and
symptomatic when you wrote: “Who would want to eliminate or undermine left
militants and leaders? It makes me wonder about COINTELPRO and disinformation
operations.” I think, first off, that you are misreading of my point: I wasn’t
talking about elimination but generalization, a positive massification. More
importantly, it is worrisome that dissenting from a program is taken as playing
for the other side. I know you meant it jokingly, and that you regret having
written it. I can’t let the point go, though, because I think it exposes a
fundamental problem with all of these calls-to-Party. Security culture is no
doubt terribly important for left organizations, particularly in light of grand
juries terrorizing anarchists in the northwest and the revelations about the
extent of FBI and DHS surveillance of Occupy. But, like, in this case, there is
nothing to secure. No Party, no mass collectivity—just a magazine and a
manifesto and their authors, all engaged in totally legal, mostly harmless
activities. We should recall that Lenin didn’t build the Party from the Cheka
up. I read the impulse to do so, even as a merely rhetorical flourish, as a
symptom of a felt lack: the lack of a mass constituency that would positively ground
a Party, that would give material positivity to its possibility. Your joke is,
of course, a small moment, but it serves as a synecdoche for the broader ways
in which Party Marxists are attempting to constitute an organization through
negation, through beating up on anarchists and horizontals. All of this
negation is purely rhetorical, totally abstract, and utterly delinked from actual
social movements. As a couple friends pointed out to me, without a constituent
power at the bottom, all of this Party-talk is utopian normativity without
effective reality. We might as well be reading Habermas.

That’s why I said the New
Newest Left is sad. Sure, there’s a flurry of activity—journals formed,
conferences held—but it’s taking place without the material-affective charge of
an actual mass movement. And when this Left gets sad it gets mean, and beats
down the dedication, courage, and history of anarchists who have already been
beaten down enough. But realize: if every horizontal, if every anarchist, if
every autonomist vanished over night, you still wouldn’t have a Party, you
would still lack an actual material
base. A collectivity isn’t going to materialize once anarchists perform a
vanishing act. After all, it is the materiality of the social that moves history,
not the “will”—however optimistic—of a Party-to-be. The disorganizationist
approach I vaguely sketched was, if nothing else, an attempt to keep close to
the actual materiality of social worlds. I never, incidentally, said that
potentials immanent to the social will necessarily emerge left, or anything
like that—just that the social resists organization from outside or above, and
that we need to develop a politics adequate to that fact.

There’s a lot more I could
say to justify what I wrote. I’ll footnote it.* Just, you know, please: as you
Party Marxists try getting something going, please do so through the
cultivation of positivities—positive communities, positive organizations,
positive affects—and less through the negativity of the Bad Anarchist Example. We
will all see one another on the streets—right?—so we should try actually
getting along.

best,

Chris

*The post-Fordist thing: I
marked out the centralization of capital through channels of profit; I was
talking about production process, not distribution. New sensoriums of the
political: what was Occupy but a mode of allowing the mass of people, excluded
from the political by the dominant spatializations of parliamentary capitalism,
to (quite literally) get in touch with the affectivity of democracy in their
ordinaries. It’s hard for me to see mass self-activation as reparative of or
functional for capital. (And, hey, maybe apologize to depressed people,
addicts, and yogis.)